Over the Christmas break I succeeded in getting through Tony Judt’s monumental (878 pages) Postwar, which, incidentally, was chosen by the editors of the New York Times as one of the ten best books of the year that’s just ended. The sheer scope of the book—tackling the history of Europe from 1945 right up to yesterday’s headlines (Judt discusses the rejection in France and the Netherlands of the EU Constitution)—means the author is automatically entitled to some respect merely for taking on such a daunting task.

Moreover, although the author in his introduction modestly claims that his treatment of the history of the past 50 years on “the subcontinental annexe to Asia” lacks any thematic shape, the author’s concerns with the issues of memory and, equally important, forgetting, are evident throughout. If the book forwards a theory (which would be a piquant for a work that chronicles the disillusionment with the Grand Theory of the 20th century, Communism), it is that Europe’s success in clawing its way out of the rubble of World War II was down to its population’s selective remembrance of what occurred between 1939 and 1945. For example, in France, although the Resistance played a fairly marginal role, its role was elevated during the post-war years while the proactive collaboration of the French, epitomized by the Vichy regime, was largely occluded. Sometimes this national “economy with the truth” was replicated at a micro level in individuals—for example, François Mitterand, the first Socialist President of the French Republic, understandably preferred to stress his service in the Resistance during the dying days of the German Occupation rather than the fact that he received an award for service to the Vichy government.

Even in Germany, a country that really couldn’t evade its responsibilities for what had unfolded, collective guilt for what has happened was often evaded by attributing the atrocities committed to the “Nazis”—a suitably abstract umbrella category that nevertheless focused on the culpability of the leadership and the relative blamelessness of those further down the hierarchy.

Perhaps the most blatant manipulation of memory occurred in Austria, when an Allied agreement officially recognized the country as Hitler’s “first victim”. Thus facts such as the cheering hordes of “victims” that greeted Hitler’s motorcade as it entered the centre of Vienna and the startling statistic—quoted by Judt—that half of all concentration camp guards were Austrian were consigned to the memory hole.

Although such evasions of the past might outrage both the historian and the moralist, the thrust of Judt’s argument is that such creative forgetfulness was necessary if European states were not to experience a rerun of the unstable decades after World War One, or indeed something worse. Even though many Europeans, especially in the Western half, did not experience or participate directly in genocide or military collaboration, their passivity was in many cases all that their Nazi administrators required. A full recognition of such shabby compromises might have undermined from the start an attempt to rebuild democracies in less than ideal circumstances: after all, if an electorate acknowledges that it lacks any sense of a fixed morality, what chance would politicians have of mobilizing voters with talk of liberty, fraternity, and equality?

Secondly, and this was especially evident in West Germany, the effort to escape the burden of the past seems to have generated frenetic displacement behaviour in the form of extraordinary production and consumption. The moral vacuum of the Germany during the Wirtschaftswunder years, captured with uncanny brilliance by the novelist Walter Abish in How German Is It?, would later provoke the Red Army Faction (better known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang) to goad the state through a campaign of bombings, kidnappings, and assassinations to reveal its latently Nazi character. Yet it is a testimony to the FRG’s stability and the consumerist thirst of its citizens, that the so-called German Autumn of 1977 memorably led to drivers putting bumper stickers proclaiming “I do not belong to the Baader-Meinhof Group” on the back of their 2002 model BMWs, which was the gang’s getaway car of choice.

More thoughts on Judt’s book—including some of its glaring flaws—in the next post.

In my last post I promised I would detail some of the more evident flaws in Tony Judt’s otherwise impressive achievement, Postwar. First, and perhaps it is just chauvinistic chippiness, but I wondered whether Albania having more index entries than Ireland is significant in what it reveals about the mindset of English-born academics of a certain age. Second, the approach to the annotations is bafflingly selective. For example, on one page there are two quotations from the ever-quotable John Maynard Keynes, one sourced, the other not. Why?

Third and most significantly, the book’s bibliography is not provided in the actual printed volume, but has to be accessed, irritatingly, from an online PDF file (http://www.nyu.edu/pages/remarque/PostwarBibliography.pdf). In his preface, Judt explains this decision was taken “[t]o avoid adding to what is already a very long book addressed to a general readership.” This is patronizing as it assumes that the general reader is a) willing to take the author’s claims on faith and b)unwilling to explore themes raised in the text. (Plus what's an extra 30-odd pages when the total comes in at 878?)

Finally, as the blind spot regarding Ireland might suggest, Judt sometimes in these pages comes across more like an exasperated Daily Mail columnist than the Europhile his undertaking would seem to require. For example, his cursory treatment of structuralism and postmodern thinking is almost wholly unilluminating, stone-kicking English empiricism at its most obdurate.

And yet the book remains an unparalleled guide (probably) for someone hoping to get an idea of the events that have shaped the most important continent (is that culturally insensitive claim?) over the past 50-plus years. It’s refreshing in its revisionism—which now seems to involve validating the contemporary impression (So the Marshall Plan was actually vital, and that Eastern Block communism—contrary to recent effusions of Ostalgie-- was not just shabby, but repressive and not infrequently murderous).

It’s also a goldmine of facts (did you know that 11,000 Portuguese died fighting in the country's various African colonies during the 1960s and 1970s—representing a mortality rate significantly higher, as a share of population, than that suffered by the U.S. Army in Vietnam?) These stats are supplemented by a wealth of shrewd quotes, one of which came back to me today. Referring to the relative mediocrity of Austria’s postwar political class, one diplomatic wag compared the country to a “an opera sung by the understudies.”

But to read dismal reports like this one, such a remark seems painfully apposite to my homeland.

The reliably dyspeptic Joseph Epstein recently penned an article with the upbeat rubric, Are Newspapers Doomed? Although eulogies for printed news dailies have been appearing fairly regularly since the advent of radio, Epstein’s article is interesting in the way it remorselessly analyses newspapers' flailing attempt to attract young readers with a bourgeoning range of “lifestyle” and celebrity features—often at the expense of serious commentary and in-depth coverage of the arts. He writes:

Nevertheless, if I had to prophesy, my guess would be that newspapers will hobble along, getting ever more desperate and ever more vulgar. More of them will attempt the complicated mental acrobatic of further dumbing down while straining to keep up, relentlessly exerting themselves to sustain the mighty cataract of inessential information that threatens to drown us all. Those of us who grew up with newspapers will continue to read them, with ever less trust and interest, while younger readers, soon enough grown into middle age, will ignore them.

Although Epstein’s remarks concern the newspaper market in the United States, his Spenglerian perspective seems equally applicable to this side of the Atlantic. In Ireland and Britain the leader in what might be called consumerist journalism is clearly The Sunday Times, numerous supplements of which seem to exist in the radioactive shadow of Heat magazine. For example, the Times Online website now features a dedicated Big Brother weblog, which unfolds under the hypocritical banner proclaiming “We Watch So You Don’t Have To.”

Similarly, The Guardian, which seems to have paradoxically found room for more superfluous journo-musings in its new compact “Berliner” format, can have its cake and eat it by rolling in the muck of celeb culture while theoretically discussing the “significance” of it all. Hence Zoe Williams can write a column under the tagline “Big Brother's muzzling of George Galloway encapsulates the reasons for our political malaise.” Big Brother and “political malaise”—the perfect Grauniad combo!

In Ireland, the Sunday Independent attempts to take on the pseudo-Hibernian Sunday Times with no less than 3 leisure supplements: Entertainment, Lifestyle, and Features. Yet despite its self-conscious metropolitan swagger, there’s something dismayingly provincial about the sight of the small pond of Irish celebrity being drained week in and week out. (For example, anyone gripped by the prospect of the brutish Brendan O'Connor sharing his insights into Stringfellows’ lapdancing clubs? I though not.)

The Irish Times’ venture into lifestyle journalism has been awkward to say the least—-think of a sturdy Church of Ireland matron in tweeds behind the wheel of a Mazda Mx5. Far less catty than its English counterparts, The Irish Times Magazine is in many respects a glorified television guide, with a few plodding columns on wine and gardening thrown in. However, its forays into Ireland’s booming retail realm are often as shamelessly cheerleading as the paper’s notoriously gawping Property supplement. (I vividly recall that some years ago the magazine bizarrely describing Morton’s, an unremarkable Ranelagh supermarket, as having a “cocktail-party atmosphere.”)

It also provides a platform for the extremely popular Róisín Ingle, whose weekly columns chronicle the ups-and-downs of being a single woman in Dublin. I have some friends who find Ingle’s musings absorbing and funny, but to me these rather twee jottings (this week she discussed the revelations stemming from buying an iPod—-a subject even my grandfather would find old hat at this stage) are part of a wider problem in contemporary journalism.

Once newspapers delivered the news, then, as television effectively monopolized this territory, the best publications tried to hold onto readership through a combination of investigative journalism and informed analysis. But the former is expensive and the latter bores a lot of people. (Some “colour writers” such as Kevin “Bastard” Myers and Mark “Eurabia” Steyn bypass the worthy chore of illuminating readers by simply using current affairs as a screen on which to project their straight-shooter personas.)

However, editors gradually learned that people would actually read people writing about the mundane minutiae of their own existences. (Perhaps it was William Leith who pioneered this auto-cannibalism with his mid-1990s columns for the Independent on Sunday.)

It was a cheap way to fill space. Yet just as television news destroyed one of newspaper’s raison d’etre, so the blogosphere is devaluing the currency of personal revelation. There are now a million William Leiths and Róisín Ingles sharing their personal vicissitudes with a global audience, although, admittedly, only a very small percentage are as well-written as the print versions. Nevertheless, 0.01% of several million blogs still yields a hell of a lot of readable copy.

So with papers’ most recent repositioning being quickly undermined by free substitutes—what are the options?

Well, according to Epstein:

My own preference would be for a few serious newspapers to take the high road: to smarten up instead of dumbing down, to honor the principles of integrity and impartiality in their coverage, and to become institutions that even those who disagreed with them would have to respect for the reasoned cogency of their editorial positions. I imagine such papers directed by editors who could choose for me—as neither the Internet nor I on my own can do—the serious issues, questions, and problems of the day and, with the aid of intelligence born of concern, give each the emphasis it deserves.

In all likelihood a newspaper taking this route would go under; but at least it would do so in a cloud of glory, guns blazing. And at least its loss would be a genuine subtraction. About our newspapers as they now stand, little more can be said in their favor than that they do not require batteries to operate, you can swat flies with them, and they can still be used to wrap fish.

Last weekend, it was possible to read about the advantages of having small breasts (The Sunday Times), the relationships between six “fashionistas” and their dogs (or their “four-legged friends” as the somnolent sub at The Irish Times Magazine phrased it), and the reflections of a journalist who recently “met one of the men who committed GBH on my heart many years ago.” (The Sunday Independent).

We might guiltily have read some of the above pieces, but if, given the worsening economics of newspapering, articles of such a calibre fail to appear in future, would we weep into our morning coffee?

Blogger Ellis Sharp delivers a pretty devastating critique of John Banville's radio play, Todtnauberg, broadcast on BBC Radio 4 last week as part of the Holocaust commemorations. I was listening to it on the laptop while engaged in the distinctly low-tech and unelevating task of doing the washing-up. But with dialogue along the lines of "His concerns echo mine – we’re both dwellers in the house of language," I think it was the first time that the process of wiping clean plates actually distracted me from listening to the radio.

In fairness to Banville, the whole “encounter between European intellectuals (one of whom got up to dodgy things during the war)” genre is not easy to pull off without sinking into portentousness. For example, I seem to remember Michael Frayn's extravagantly praised play, Copenhagen (which, admittedly, I saw only as a TV adaptation) that dealt with a mysterious wartime meeting between Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, did not entirely escape the pitfalls of lumbering exposition and furrow-browed commentary that Banville's play so spectacularly fell into.

Just as the hysterical claims that the Sheffield outfit has already surpassed The Beatles in musical achievement have the paradoxical effect of making me never want to hear another track from the “world-beating album” by the Arctic Monkeys, so the assertions that David Foster Wallace is the best writer of his (our?) generation have ensured that up until now I have never read a word by the prolific American. However, the other day I came across a copy of his latest collection of stories, Oblivion, retailing at the low, low, low price of €3.99. (Such periodic stock clearances, while great for the consumer, suggest that the publishing industry is not one to enter if you want to get rich.)

Anyway, I’m glad that I made the micro-investment because, on the strength of the stories in Oblivion, I think that Wallace, if not the greatest writer of our era, is at least the real deal.

Which is not to say he cannot be frustrating. The first story, "Mr. Squishy," oscillates between the deliberations of a focus group on a prospective mass-produced confection and the increasingly unhinged meditations of the group’s facilitator, Terry Schimdt, who, in a spiral of self-loathing, both feels that his amorphous face has started to resemble that of the eponymous corporate logo and plans to go into stores and inject the aforementioned snack with botulism culture.

The underlying “message” of the story is one that has been a staple of American fiction since at least Sinclair Lewis-–modern American capitalism can be a soul-crushing business. What Wallace brings to the table is a fascination with the jargon of the industry in question, a dense web of acronyms and capitalised nouns that suggests that the business of marketing a high-cholesterol “high-concept chocolate-intensive Mister Squishy-brand snack cake designed primarily for individual sale in convenience stores […]” requires the same exhaustive preparation as a shuttle launch.

Although there is some comedy in the gap between the seriousness of the argot and the triviality of its object, after 63 pages such mimetic verisimilitude becomes a tad wearing.

And yet Wallace’s linguistic inclinations (like, say, George Steiner, he can be counted on to write “oneiric” where “dreamlike” would do and choose “ludic” over “playful”) can lead the reader down the oddest paths, at the end of which they can find themselves, to their uneasy surprise, in unexpected and usually sinister places.

For example, “The Soul Is Not a Smithy,” set in 1960, concerns a child who is a compulsive day-dreamer (who would probably be diagnosed today as suffering from ADD) whose increasingly dark fabulations about a blind girl and her lost dog distract him from the sight of his substitute teacher convulsively slashing the message “KILL THEM ALL” on the blackboard. Just as the reader thinks they have grasped the trajectory of the story, lurid but comprehensible, it then segues into an equally dark but at the same time poignant reflection about the protagonist’s father, whose loathing of his job and low-grade misery is only appreciated by his son in the wake of his death.

I’ll talk some more in the next post about the writer Wallace most closely resembles (not Thomas Pynchon as the back-cover blurb would have it) and how one story seems to encapsulate or explore some of the problems facing the contemporary fiction writer who wants to "say something different."

Two stories from Oblivion reveal David Foster Wallace’s debt to Jorge Luis Borges* most clearly. The first, “Another Pioneer,” which indirectly recounts the story of the influence of a child prodigy/deity on the mindset of a nameless Palaeolithic tribe living in an Amazonian rainforest, borrows the quintessential Borgesian technique of using a framing or distancing device.

Whereas Borges uses fictional books as a kind of buffer between the author and the phantasmagorical worlds he evokes (Think, for example, of the beginning of the story "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius"—“I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopaedia.”), Wallace frames his mythical tale by having it passed on to the narrator from someone who overheard a conversation between two partially observed passengers (he is sitting behind them) on a United Airlines flight.

In both cases, the end result is a heightened sense of the uncanny as the bizarre is yoked to the mundane—-more than that in fact, because in Wallace’s story the tale’s intermediary is able to see only the backs of the heads of the people engaged in this extraordinary conversation. There is something ominous in the storyteller’s and his interlocutor’s faces being unseen (think of the “girl” wearing the red hooded coat in “Don’t Look Now”), with the effect that the uncanny** now flows in both directions—not only is the reader\listener dragged out of normality by the story into a sinister and unfamiliar world but the mundane here-and-now has also become contaminated by alien elements. Paradoxically, the “distancing” device, in both Borges and Wallace, makes the horror more proximate.

More, on "Good Old Neon" in an unscheduled DFW III.

*In recognition of DFW’s much-noted fondness for the footnote, I’ll use this annotative niche to say that Wallace does share at least one striking similarity with the writer with whom he appears to be most frequently compared, Thomas Pynchon. The final story in Oblivion, “The Suffering Channel” deals with the editorial struggle experienced by a salaryman working for a BSG (“big soft glossy”) as he tries to persuade the magazine to cover the astonishing works of faecal art that a Indiana man excretes, seemingly fully formed. It seems if you want to be a serious American writer (or at least a serious male American writer), you have to get down into the shit, so to speak—-because there’s also Jonathan Franzen and his doddery patriarch hallucinating about insolent turds (The Corrections), William H. Gass and the scatological obsessions of his suitably named protagonist, Kohler (The Tunnel) , and, of course, The Godfather of High-Brow Poop, Pynchon himself, who notoriously in Gravity’s Rainbow had his World War I veteran, Brigadier Pudding, indulge in a spot of stomach-turning coprophagia with a Dutch prostitute.

Why these theses about faeces? Perhaps, ever since Joyce placed Leopold Bloom on the pot, it has become a sort-of-passage for a writer with aspirations to being a Modernist (or even Postmodernist) to marshal his (almost always “his”) writing chops in describing this most, er, regular of routines. The airy-fairy Pre-Raphaelites can go into raptures over the stones of Venice, but it—it might be assumed—takes a real genius to make the porcelain of Adamant seem sublime.

Another possibility is that some of the later writers were\are working in an era when critical kudos were being belatedly assigned to previously marginalized voices--women and minorities. In age when the chest-beating male writer a la Norman Mailer was going increasingly out of fashion, perhaps a whiff of shit (don’t laugh) was a sign, albeit an enervated one, that Franzen and Wallace could still keep it real?

**Another Wallacian footnote: The English “uncanny” is an inadequate translation of the famous Freudian concept of unheimlich, which is the (apparent) opposite of heimlich, or “homely”.